The aim of this Master's thesis is to explore how the localisation and the design affect the conditions for a school-media centre. A school-media centre is in this study a place where the students seek, find and evaluate information, discuss and exchange ideas. An active place for generating knowledge. The method applied in this study is "Space Syntax Analysis", a quantitative method with visual representation of the results. In the theoretical framework, space is the voids between walls, doors and ceiling, between furniture and bookshelves.

There is an increasing demand for information literacy, which is mirrored in curriculum throughout the whole educational system. This, in turn, has brought forward a growing need for librarians who can teach. But do librarians possess pedagogical competence, and if they do, how is this ability used in everyday library practice? The aim of this study is to investigate librarians' conceptions of the pedagogical role, as it is expressed in their didactic interaction with the users. The research questions focus on librarians' experiences of teaching information seeking and use and their activities in this respect.

The purpose of this study is to gauge the current state of Swedish library and information science research. LIS is generally defined as a cross- or multidisciplinary subject, according to some coupled with heterogenity or dichotomy within the subject. In light of Jack Meadows?s description of the scientific community growth and scientific communication, the following two research questions are formulated as basis for the study: 1. What are the current themes, what range of theories and methods are used in our research material? 2.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to investigate upper secondary school librarians conceptions of fiction mediation. By using a phenomenographic method, the different conceptions of the specific phenomena, how the librarians conceptualise their work with mediation of fiction, are made clear. The aim of the method is not to study what fiction mediation is constituted of, but rather how upper secondary school librarians understand it. Qualitative interviews were held with eight upper secondary school librarians about their conceptions of their working tasks, the meaning of fiction for youths, reading promotion, inspiration to purchase of fiction, free voluntary reading and if the importance of fiction has changed over time. The results showed that the upper secondary school librarians conceptualise their working tasks as both changeable and repeatable.

Mina slutsatser i mitt arbete är att rollen som finns inom Ithna Ashery inte är homogeniserad när man jämför olika individers subjektiva upplevelse av fenomenet. Däremot om man tittar på en metanivå så kan deras roll se tämligen lika ut. Men på individnivå, som detta arbete försökt behandla, så är den subjektiva upplevelsen av rollerna olika. Det som till stor grad påverkar den subjektiva upplevelse av rollen är sådana saker som den omgivande kontexten i samhället. Men även de mål den enskilda individen har med sin roll när det gäller framtiden för individen.

The aim of this master thesis is to describe some general trends and important steps in the Swedish university libraries user-orientation from the implementation of the university college reform 1977 until today. The aim gave rise to four further questions. Literature studies and empirical studies in the form of focusing interviews have been carried out, in order to answer the questions. Of the entire background material I have made a simple form of general analysis. I found that the libraries, during the years have interacted with the following four interested parties, the government, the mother organization, other libraries and the library users.

This Masters thesis deals with query expansion in an online library catalogue. The aim of the study was to compare the retrieval effectiveness of four different query types when applied to the online library catalogue of the University College of Borås. The query types were: an initial query, the initial query with right hand truncation, the initial query expanded with synonyms and finally the initial query expanded with synonyms and right hand truncation. 24 topics were formulated, and four queries for each topic were constructed. The records retrieved by the searches were judged with regard to topicality, and were judged to be non-relevant, partially relevant or relevant.

This master thesis is about art activity in the public library. The essay takes its starting point from Government cultural political directives and my purpose has been to study how these are followed up in the municipal level. My survey takes place at the main library of Flen in the county of Södermanland. What I am looking for is, what the art activity looks like, what is decided regarding it and what the strategies are. Furthermore I look into how library visitors understand and participate in the art activity.

Resource-based learning or problem-oriented learning are teaching methods that are becoming more and more common in schools today. In order to make these teaching methods work there is a demand to make students information literate. This entails that school librarians ought to play a more important role in teaching than before since they are the ones that are the most qualified when it comes to mediating information skills. The aim of this thesis is to find out how nine teachers at six senior high schools apprehend the professional role of the school librarian and how they apprehend the conception of information literacy In order to learn about these conceptions we have chosen to study to what extent collaboration exists in the schools in question and the teachers conceptions of the importance of the school librarian in this context. We have used phenomenography which is both a set of theoretical assumptions and a methodology.

The object of this explorative theoretical study is to compare similarities in three perspectives for evaluation of credibility. The perspectives are the historical method source-criticism, cognitive authority and domain analysis. These perspectives, regarded as intellectual tools for critical thinking in a process of information seeking, by asking questions about credibility related to the social and theoretical context of the intellectual background, can give support in articulating which documents that gives a specific and essential answer to a question. In this sense credibility is seen as a qualitative aspect of relevance. Patrick Wilson argues that we can attain some critical independence towards cognitive authorities and the literature by investigating the social and theoretical topography of a field.

This study focuses on the encounter between the academic librarian and the academic library user with a specific need for information. The aim of the study is to examine the process of mediation of information and to uncover any inherent problems or systemic inertia that may occur within that process.Special attention has been given to information-seeking behaviour in the digital age and the possibility of viewing information literacy as a meta-literacy. The difference between the surface web and the academic invis- ible web is also investigated. Empirical data was collected by the use of ethnographic fieldwork at the Karolin- ska Institutet University Library over a period of five weeks. The data is analysed using actor-network theory as a point of departure.

Jag har utvärderat Umeåregionens bibliotekssamarbete. Samarbetet innebär att biblioteken i kommunerna Bjurholm, Nordmaling, Robertsfors, Umeå, Vindeln och Vännäs har en gemensam bibliotekskatalog och att låntagare har ett lånekort som gäller för hela regionen. Låntagare kan låna och lämna tillbaka media på samtliga bibliotek i regionen.                                                                                          Syftet med utvärderingen är att kartlägga låneflödena mellan biblioteken i regionen för att få kunskap för att utveckla medieförsörjningsstrategier och ?metoder på biblioteken. Utvärderingen innehåller en översiktlig kartläggning av låneströmmarna i hela regionen samt en mer detaljerad kartläggning av låneströmmarna mellan Umeå stadsbibliotek och Ålidhemsbiblioteket (Umeå kommun).

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to examine how gender patterns are described in the modern picture book. Focus is on the description of men and women and their emotions and living conditions. Do the descriptions follow stereotypes in the form of binary opposites strong/weak, active/passive etc. in which one component of the pair, often associated with masculinity, is privileged or are there examples of breach of normative gender? The analysis is based upon forty of 149 picture books that are presented in a children's book catalogue published by The Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs Statens kulturråd, in the year of 2000.

The aim of this study has been to discuss ideas of knowledge within classification theory and subject analysis in the light of theories of fundamental changes in the production of scientific knowledge. Guiding questions have been: How have the conditions of knowledge production changed? How has interdisciplinarity as part of this development evolved? What assumptions lie behind theories of classification and subject analysis? How do these stand in relation to the alleged changes in the production and understanding of science? Three works about the changing conditions for knowledge production and the growth of crossdisciplinarity have been presented and discussed. These works stress the loosening up of boundaries between traditional knowledge domains and open up for discussions about how to organize knowledge production in the light of these changes. In the study it is argued that their works also could open up for discussions about the way knowledge is organized for retrieval purposes.

This Masters Thesis is about the Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs and the arms length principle. The principle is used to explain the separation of power between two parts with a common interest. The main purpose is to elucidate if, and if so in what way, the arms length principle can be used to explain the relation between the National Council for Cultural Affairs and the Ministry of Education and Culture, i.e. the Swedish government, but also to examine the structures of power and relations within the Council. In the thesis we show that in the field of cultural policy the content of the arm lengths principle varies due to the many interpretations of the meaning.